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Knowing that you have the tools to regain control so you can give yourself permission to eat the foods you love without worry, guilt or shame has so much more healing benefits for the body and soul than abstaining or caving-in and then torturing yourself afterwards.

If you’ve already over-indulged don’t worry! Stay with me and learn that instead of throwing in the towel and giving up on your commitment, it’s not too late to regain your control and will-power.

It Needs to Start with Acceptance

For those of you that just cringed at the word “acceptance,” chill. I’m not going all woo-woo on you and telling you to “Just love yourself more and the weight will melt off” or “Just accept yourself as who you are and your life will be perfect” because that’s just bullshit in this context.

For people like myself, who were metabolically resistant and could gain five pounds by simply looking at a piece of pumpkin pie, telling me nonsense like that made me want to bang my head against a wall and think you’re an idiot. I don’t want that for either one of us.

While loving and accepting yourself is paramount to living a spiritually fulfilling and happy life, that’s a topic for another day. So please don’t confuse my use of the word “acceptance” as permission to avoid getting your shit back together and letting one splurge day of eating be your excuse for falling into unhealthy eating habits until the next time your faced with putting a bathing suit.

Top Excuses why People Abandon Healthy Eating after a Huge Meal

“I completely lost control and ate more on Thanksgiving Day than I have in 6 months. So, I just decided that I may as well finish the leftovers over the next few days and what the hell, I may as well eat the leftover desserts too!”

“I’ve already started the week bad so I may as well just keep going through the weekend and get back on track Monday.”

“It’s winter, no one sees my body under all these clothes anyway!”… I could go on and on because I’ve heard every excuse in the book. What’s yours?

Problems with Giving-up your Healthy Habits Due to Over-Indulging

You don’t realize that you’ve given yourself permission to (or are fully aware and just ignoring) that you’ve given up and jumped right on the slippery slope downwards.

Now you’re on a full-scale, I-don’t-give-a-crap food-bender through the holidays. Then comes Sunday afternoon tailgate parties followed by Monday night football…well, you get the idea.

You already feel like you failed yourself over the holidays so why not indulge in a few more beers, chips, dips, hot-dogs, wings, or whatever your other unhealthy menu selections of choice may be.

To these fried and fatty party foods, add the body’s natural tendency to hold on to extra fat during the winter months and you’ll have the perfect recipe for the notorious winter weight creep.

Why Many People Gain During the Winter Months

The body doesn’t know that we live in a culture of continuous food. It’s been programmed for millions of years to store fat for the upcoming months of cold and famine…famine that no longer exists in our modern era of fast food, “all you can eat” buffets, and mega-mart food centers.

What we don’t consider is that once you start your body’s natural process of fattening up for winter ‘survival,’ by the time you get through the holidays you will have eaten yourself into the perfect fat-storing machine.

Once your jeans start getting a little tighter, the holidays are upon you and you’re lost in pumpkin pie, yuletide holiday feasts, and New Year’s celebrations. By now the past three months of indulgences have already overwhelmed you with guilt.

So how can we defy circadian rhythms and fight the urge to fatten up during the winter?

As you’ve hopefully gleaned from what I’ve shared thus far, without a actionable plan you’re not only fighting your own will-power but evolution as well. Yes people, I’m telling you that it’s not all your fault!

Post-Holiday / Winter Weight Loss Diet Rescue Tips

Prepare for the Celebration: Give yourself permission to indulge without guilt. Overeating for one day won’t make or break your eating plan. And it certainly won’t make you gain weight! It takes days and days of overeating to gain weight..

A recent article fromWomen’s Health Magazine, which consulted the expert insight of Samantha Cassetty, R.D., M.S., nutrition director at Luvo points out that it’s nearly impossible to gain weight in just one day, even if you significantly exceeded your normal daily intake..

Don’t be a Closet Eater:Understanding the above, you now have permission to indulge without guilt or shame. Venturing down the road of “woo-woo” here, my professional experience has shown a direct correlation between a person’s relationship with food and their physiology..

Understand that I am not suggesting that there aren’t other factors involved. However, my opinion is that if you believe that something is bad or harmful for you there will be some negative physiological consequences. It works in reverse with the placebo effect, so this is a logical hypothesis as far as I’m concerned..In the study, The Impact of Shame, Self-Criticism and Social Rank on Eating Behaviors in Overweight and Obese Women, published by the US National Library of Medicine, it has been shown that “Women with higher BMIs had higher external shame, self-criticism (especially self-hatred), were less self-reassuring, felt more inferior to others, had higher weight-related negative and lower positive affect.”.

Maintain Perspective and Take back Control of your Willpower: Remember the reasons you chose to get fit and healthy to begin with. Make a list of “Self Affirmations” about your goals and pin it someplace you see repeatedly throughout the day (like right next to your computer screen). Then pin another copy on your refrigerator door..

A large body of literature demonstrates that a class of interventions called self-affirmations have benefits across threatening situations; affirmations can decrease stress, increase well being, improve academic performance and make people more open to behavior change (for a review, see Cohen and Sherman (2014.).Self-affirmations are acts that affirm one’s self-worth, often by having individuals reflect on core values, which may give individuals a broader view of the self. This in turn can allow individuals to move beyond specific threats to self-integrity or self-competence (Steele, 1988 ; Cohen and Sherman, 2014).

Get rid of ALL the left-overs and junk foodfrom your house. This includes all the obvious left-over cookies, pies, chips & dips but also the foods you may think are healthy..

Hate to throw away food? Me too. So donate to the needy and if you have no-one to donate the left-overs to such as a homeless shelter or less fortunate neighbor. Then remove the incentive to wolf down obscene quantities of perishable goodies – like that lovely homemade apple pie, New York bagels or other holiday baked goods – by freezing them at the peak of freshness..Packed in freezer-safe bags, these items will last for months and defrost to excellent quality at an appropriate time and place of your choosing. An article in US News titled, Is Fear of Food Waste Making you Fat, reports that it is a “constellation of external factors that contribute to increased likelihood of out-eating our energy needs and gaining excessive weight.”.It’s true; if it’s out of sight it will be out of mind, too. (Calories saved = 1500 per day,maybe more.) Hidden calories that can slam weight loss come from many other sneaky places, not just leftover holiday goodies. Find out where your hidden calories are here!.

Get a full night’s sleep! Sleep (or lack of it) has a direct effect on body weight. ScienceDaily (May 23, 2009), reports that there appears to be a link between sleep and weight control, with some studies indicating that sleep disruption can increase weight.

.Studies found that, among other things, “When sleep was restricted, dieters produced higher levels of Ghrelin, a hormone that triggers hunger and reduces energy expenditure.” .The amount of sleep that we need varies, but according to the National Sleep foundation adults need between 7-9 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. And according to new research from Iowa State University, losing just a few hours of sleep at night will almost certainly make you react more angrily when faced with frustrating situations—like controlling the urge to over eat. .Consider this just one more reason to prioritize those zzz’s. (As if we needed another!) Read more about how sleep effects your waistline..

Drink a gallon of water a day to help flush your system and to improve natural calorie-burning metabolism. If you aren’t properly hydrated you won’t burn the fat as fast as you could.

.Author Simon N. Thornton writes in his published article, “Increased water intake is associated with loss of body weight produced via two mechanisms, decreased feeding and increased lipolysis”..Just don’t waterboard yourself as too much fluid can create an electrolyte imbalance and cause other problems. Putting a pinch of Himalayan salt in your water can prevent this and also help to alleviate any constipation associated with changing your diet..

Do NOT over exercise! The minute people overindulge the first thing they do is run to the gym and beat themselves up. Extra calories are just stored fuel, right? To burn it, you gotta move!

Don’t take my word for it just go to the gym the week after New Year’s and see for yourself! Another common misconception of successful weight loss is not just if you are exercising but how you are exercising..Ironically over exercising can be equally as detrimental as under exercising. Yes, I know it sounds hard to believe but over exercising can actually be making you fatter.Read more about over exercising..

Do NOT cut healthy fats from your diet: We all know better by now, don’t we? It’s 2018 and it’s been clinically proven over and over that eating fat does not make you FAT.

.“There is one thing we know about fats,” Aaron Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, writes in his new book, The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully. “Fat consumption does not cause weight gain. To the contrary, it might actually help us shed a few pounds.”.Sugar, on the other hand, will not only make you fat, but sick. The (new) bad news is that sugar does more damage to our bodies than we originally thought. It was once considered to be just another marker for an unhealthy diet and obesity. Now, sugar is considered an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease, as well as many other chronic diseases, according a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine..“Sugar has adverse health effects above any purported role as ’empty calories’ promoting obesity,” writes Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, in an accompanying editorial. “Too much sugar doesn’t just make us fat; it can also make us sick.”.

Consider Fasting: Yikes! I saved this one for last because whenever I suggest it to my clients 90% of the time I’m met with denial and/or horror. However, there are different types of fasting and perhaps one will fit into your lifestyle.

.Fasting doesn’t always mean complete abstinence from food. I am a big fan of water-only fasting for periods of 24 – 86 hours (no more than 7 days without direct medical supervision.) But my circumstance was for rebooting my immune system after a bout of chronic Lyme disease. Read my story here if you’re interested in learning more..To this day, I still do a 72-hour fast at least once every 60-days. The rest of the time I practice Intermittent Fasting (IF – eating all of your meals in a 6 to 8-hour window), or just eat One Meal a Day (OMAD). If you’d like more information please subscribe to my newsletter as I’ll be writing feature posts on those subjects in the near future..If the thought of any type of fasting makes you want to run and you have more than 5-pounds to lose, consider doing the HCG Diet. For most people a 28-day program is enough to reboot your body after the holidays. This program lets you eat 500-700 calories a day with the assistance of a prescription hormone that eradicates hunger and maintains muscle mass while eating a very low-calorie diet (VLCD)..Whatever path you choose, if you’re looking for motivation to stick to your diet or for someone to hold you accountable, BodyFit Superstore is your partner in achieving your weight loss and vitality goals. We offer a comprehensive one-on-one Coaching program to help you with your fitness goals, diet questions, and choosing the right supplements and programs for your success.

We’ll even give you a FREE 30-min phone or video conference, with no strings attached. If you’d like to chat and learn more about our programs, don’t hesitate to reach out and schedule a call. Filling out the no-obligation intake form will help get the most out of your free session.

So, there you have it, my top Post-Holiday / Winter Weight Loss Diet Rescue Plan. If you liked this content, please share! We’ve got more stories like this so if you want to be included in our inner circle updates please sign-up for our mailing list! You’ll get FREE gifts; promo codes and we don’t spam or sell your info EVER!